Sunday, November 26, 2017

Tubas

Right now the world needs the occasional escape from politics. What could be less political than . . . tubas?

Mixed Meters has given you tubas before. Most prominently, way back in 2008, in the post Tubas on the Beach in Art and Advertising. which showed two actual print ads featuring scantily clad women sporting that most feminine of all instruments, the sousaphone (which is just a tuba bent differently). About a year later we had the much more male oriented Tubas and the Federal Reserve. Tubas can also be found in this post (scroll down).

Ever since then I've been collecting the occasional tuba photograph or cartoon just for today. Click on any picture for an enlargement. We begin with a series of tuba related comics by Gary Larson, creator of the Far Side.

No review of humorous tuba drawings should overlook Gerard Hoffnung. Besides being a cartoonist, Hoffnung actually played the tuba. The last panel shows a tubist walking his instrument on a leash across the opening measures of the solo part to the Vaughan Williams Tuba Concerto. (Hands up all of you who actually knew there was a Vaughan Williams Tuba Concerto.)

Now the category called Women With Tubas, beginning with the most wholesome, a banner advertising our local music school. Next, Mrs. Emma Peel (as played by Diana Rigg, both video and still) on The Avengers television series. Then it gets kinky.

This cartoon, by Claude Serre, might be interest mainly to music copyists such as myself. I guess that's the proper notation for "blatt" even in that altissimo register.

And finally - Tuba with Tentacles (a refrigerator magnet left over from a monthly hipster gathering at the Natural History Museum where Leslie works), Tuba as Ostrich and Wagner Tubas as Urinals.

A picture of a Wagner Tuba made into a lamp can be found a ways into this post.